Old Faces, New Hopes
by Marcus S. Lazarus
Summary: Sequel to "Broken Faith" A distress signal on a frequency the Doctor never expected would activate again leads to the discovery that an old friend has survived the Time War. TenMartha
1. Unexpected Reunion

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AN: This is a sequel to my story "Broken Faith", but reading that isn't a prerequisite to understand this one; all you _need _to know about the events of "Broken Faith" is that it ended with the Doctor and Martha deciding to try for a relationship after the Year That Never Was, with the Doctor remaining on Earth until Martha completes her studies to give them both a chance at some kind of normal life rather than a life consisting of them time-travelling everywhere

Old Faces, New Hopes

"I can't _believe_ you said that!" Martha said, her tone a mixture of annoyance and amusement as she opened the door of her apartment, looking at the Doctor with a teasing glare.

"What?" the Doctor replied, shrugging nonchalantly as he looked at her, his confused expression- particularly in the leather jacket and T-shirt she'd insisted he wear despite his claims that it made him feel like he'd retro-regenerated; his suits were nice but they stuck out on more casual nights- making him look more human than she'd ever seen him. "All I _said _was that I hadn't had that much fun at a party since a few years back-"

"Two _centuries _ago?" Martha said, shaking her head as she stepped aside to allow the Doctor into their new flat (_Her _new one, anyway; the Doctor had apparently bought it a couple of bodies back and never gotten around to putting it up for sale), locking the door before she turned back to him. "You didn't think that might have attracted a _little _attention?"

"You don't think they believed the explanation?" the Doctor asked, raising an inquiring eyebrow with a teasingly hurt expression on his face.

Martha could only shake her head at his nonchalantly bemused expression; she could never tell if the Doctor was being serious or not in moments like this. Ever since they'd come back to the present after the TARDIS's 'test flight', Martha's medical studies had been going well- aided in no small part by the fact that the Doctor's library had access to several textbooks that she could use when revising, including a few that hadn't even been written yet (Although the Doctor was careful to provide nothing about as-yet-undeveloped cures, of course)-, but finding a long-term, non-alien-based career for the Doctor had been surprisingly difficult, and his occasional weird comments sometimes made things more complicated as people were uncertain whether to take him seriously.

He'd managed to get past the stage where he was making bizarre references to meeting people from history at least twice an hour in public, of course, but finding a job still hadn't been easy. He'd eventually settled into teaching, taking a position as a science teacher in a nearby school; he'd thought about teaching history, but it was a silent agreement on the part of both that anything relating to his time as John Smith should be avoided (He still couldn't believe he'd even _thought_ about asking Joan to come with him; he must have had more of Smith hanging around in his mind back then than he'd realised. Although he'd alerted UNIT to his presence on Earth in case something came up that urgently required his attention, he'd declined the offer of a more permanent post; he was trying to make a normal life for himself, and regular contact with aliens wouldn't help achieve that.

Martha's friends and fellow students had been more than slightly surprised to learn that she was now dating the mysterious 'Mr Smith' when the Doctor had first shown up at Martha's first night out with her old 'study group' since settling back into her old life, but he'd swiftly managed to put them all at ease with his usual friendly manner (Julia had even sent him a flirtatious grin or two, although the Doctor never gave any impression that he'd noticed it); these days he was just accepted as a strange but pleasant addition to their group.

"Well, if they did or didn't, it's not important; the amount some of them were drinking, they probably won't be sure if you were serious about being a medieval enthusiast getting caught in the moment or not tomorrow morning," Martha said, shaking her head slightly as she looked at him. "After all, you _had _drunk quite a bit, and they don't know about that trick you can do with alcohol…"

"Oh, you mean my ability to metabolise it like other-?" the Doctor began, only to stop himself with a sheepish smile. "Sorry; doing it again."

"Don't worry about it," Martha said, smiling briefly at him; ever since she'd started reading some of the Doctor's books on Gallifreyian physiology in the TARDIS library, she'd asked him to avoid mentioning any specific details about his anatomy until she'd read about them in her own time, but a few casual comments on his part were nothing to be concerned about. "Anyway… was there a _reason _you dragged me out of that party so quickly when it ended?"

"Oh, just… wanted to give you something in private," the Doctor said, before he reached into his pocket and pulled out a smallish black box, slightly narrower and longer than a traditional DVD box set.

"Uh… what's this?" Martha asked, as she took

"Your birthday present," the Doctor replied with a casual smile.

"What?" Martha said, looking in confusion at the Doctor as she indicated the dark jacket she was now wearing, apparently chosen by the Doctor to make up for the damage her old jacket had sustained during the Year That Never Was (Despite the fact that the jacket had been restored after Time reversed). "But… you already gave me this…"

"Oh, that was just the _public _present; didn't want your friends thinking I was being cheap," the Doctor said, indicating the box with a casual wave of his hand. "After all, be a bit difficult to explain that this _isn't _a cheap torch without explaining that I'm an alien…"

For a moment, Martha's confused expression remained as she opened the offered box, only for her eyes to widen in understanding as she took in the sight of its contents.

"Oh my God…" she whispered, as she took the silver-coloured tube-shaped device out of the box, staring at the blue lamp on the other end. "It's… it's…"

"A sonic screwdriver?" the Doctor said, nodding at her with a casual smile. "Bingo; I even included a few medical attachments that mine doesn't have. Of course, I had to sacrifice a couple of the frequency-scanning features, but-"

Further conversation was cut off as Martha pulled his head down towards her to give him a deep kiss, her body- as it always did- privately thrilling at the feel of the Doctor's double heartbeat against her chest, a reminder that this unique, incredible man had chosen to stay with her rather than anyone else…

The sound of what seemed to be a deep bell rapidly ringing prompted the Doctor to pull away from Martha, a shocked expression on his face.

"What?" Martha asked, squashing down the part of herself that immediately wondered what had drawn the Doctor's attention away from her this time; they had _passed _that stage of their relationship a long time ago. "What's that sound?"

"It's…" the Doctor paused, his expression shifting into a state of confusion as he turned to look at the door to his room, before he hurried towards it, opened the door and practically dived into the TARDIS, the light on top of the Police Box blinking on and off in a manner that Martha recognised from when the ship was about to take off. For a moment she panicked- was the Doctor leaving already?-, but then she calmed herself down with the reminder that the light had been active since _before _the Doctor entered the ship, and she pushed her fears aside in favour of entering the ship that had been her home for so many months.

"What is it?" Martha repeated, as the Doctor stared intently at something on the TARDIS monitor. "What's wrong?"

"Low-level telepathic distress signal…" the Doctor muttered, looking up at Martha with a slightly stunned expression in his eyes. "Someone I know is in danger."

"What?" Martha said after a moment's silence, realising that he wasn't going to elaborate. "Where's the problem; if someone needs help-"

"It's not that simple…" the Doctor said, his tone slow as he looked at the screen, seemingly trying to figure out something even as he spoke. "This signal's coming through rather faintly- which suggests that the person sending it doesn't entirely know what they're doing, implying that they aren't naturally telepathic-, but it's being transmitted on a mental frequency that…"

"That what?" Martha asked, already wondering where the Doctor was going with this.

"That only Time Lords knew," the Doctor said.

Martha's eyes widened in understanding.

If someone was transmitting a telepathic signal on a frequency only Time Lords could know about, when the Doctor didn't know about their presence already…

The implications of that statement weren't exactly encouraging, really; if someone had somehow discovered a means of transmitting a message to the TARDIS, who knew what else they might have discovered?

"We're checking it out?" she asked.

"Not exactly much alternative, is there?" the Doctor said, as he reached over to activate the TARDIS controls. "Anyway, the sooner we get this out of the way, the sooner we can get back to work; you've still got a couple of months left until your exams, and I'm _definitely _not ditching my students before I've had the chance to get them through _their _end-of-year tests…"

Even as Martha nodded in confirmation, the Doctor had already set the TARDIS in motion, the time rotor coming to a halt a few moments later.

"We're there," the Doctor said, briefly glancing at the monitor before he nodded in apparent confirmation, although the grim expression on his face made it clear that he wasn't happy about something. "Nothing immediately dangerous out there; we can go if we want."

As the Doctor and Martha stepped out the TARDIS, Martha was surprised to find herself standing in what looked like an old stone cell, several people around the walls surrounded by elaborate machines, many of them with needles and tubes connected up to their arms, each of them still and silent as they lay there. An armoured creature lay in the centre of the cell, its body clad in an elaborate suit of armour, revealing an only vaguely humanoid face beneath it.

"Oh my God…" Martha said, looking sadly at the bodies around them before she turned to look at the Doctor. "Are… are they…?"

"Dead?" the Doctor finished, looking sadly over at Martha. "They are… probably just a bit before we got here."

As he turned to look at indicating the armoured figure in the middle of the room, "Another round of pointless deaths… caused by yet another pointless action of the Z'nai."

"The who?" Martha asked.

"His race," the Doctor answered, a grim expression of distaste on his face as he glanced at the body. "They were a group of cloned warriors I encountered a few lifetimes back; the Time Lords sent me to stop them after their leader- a bit of a deranged lunatic, really- discovered a primitive time capsule, and my companion Leela and I later had to deal with their leader's attempts to re-establish his empire-"

"You… you lie…" a voice suddenly said weakly from off to the side, prompting the Doctor and Martha to look in the direction of the voice, revealing an old woman slumped to the ground despite the bonds holding her to the wall, her long grey hair hanging over her face as she stared grimly at the two new arrivals. "You… were not there… the Doctor… is dead… he is gone… they are… all gone…"

"What…?" the Doctor said, his eyes wide with confusion as he walked over to the speaker, crouching down in front of the figure, reaching out to take her chin in his hand and raise her head, revealed the weathered, worn face of an old woman with intense blue eyes.

Before Martha could say anything, the Doctor had released the woman's chin and leant backwards in shock, astonishment all over his face as he stared at the prisoner.

"It can't be…" he whispered incredulously, staring at the woman with a level of shock that Martha had only seen on his face when he'd first learned that Professor Yana was a Time Lord. "_Leela_?"

* * *

AN 2: For those who don't know who Leela is, questions about her identity will be answered in the next chapter (For now, if you want to look for further information about her for yourself, all you need to know is that she was a companion of the Fourth Doctor); for those who _do _know who she is, explanations for her survival- and the 'signal' the Doctor received- will also be provided then


	2. Saving Leela

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Old Faces, New Hopes

"Leela?" Martha repeated, looking at the Doctor in surprise. "Uh… you're not talking about the mutant cyclops, right?"

"What- oh, _Futurama_, right?" the Doctor said, looking briefly back at Martha before he shook his head. "No, nothing like that; Leela was a descendent of a survey team that crash-landed on a planet several centuries in your future whose people were manipulated by an insane supercomputer that I'd accidentally programmed…"

"What…?" the woman said, raising her head further so that she could continue to stare at the Doctor, suspicion still clear in her eyes as she studied the man before her. "How do… you know…?"

"Leela…" the Doctor said, his voice assuming a soft, comforting tone as he walked back over to crouch down in front of the elderly woman, smiling reassuringly at her. "It's all right… I'm _here_ now. I'm not… I'm not dead or contaminated by the Faction or anti-time or the Daleks or whatever else I was exposed to before the Time War… I'm _me_…"

"Can't be…" Leela said, her voice weak even as the Doctor took in a faint gleam of hope in her eyes. "The Doctor… is gone… he fell… he failed…we all failed…"

"Come on, after we started a revolution on Pluto and blew up the Fendahl, you really think a little thing like a Time War would stop me?" the Doctor asked, a tender smile on his face as he reached out to touch Leela's face once again. "Leela, I'm not dead; I'm _here_, and I'm going to get you out of here…"

"Can't…" Leela muttered weakly, shaking her head as the brief sparkle of hope in her eyes faded once again. "Too weak… too old… no Gallifrey… aging fast…"

"What?" the Doctor said, his eyes widening in a sudden realisation. "You mean…?"

He groaned as he sat back on the ground before Leela, a frustrated glare on his face. "Of _course _you would… you're not _from _Gallifrey; the bio-fields would have only affected you as long as you were _there_…"

"Uh… bio-fields?" Martha repeated, looking in confusion at the Doctor. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, normally Time Lord aging is significantly retarded due to active bio-fields that help us to heal and regenerate; actually, in most cases simply staying on Gallifrey renders Time Lords practically immortal as the bio-fields all 'feed' off each other to virtually halt the aging process," the Doctor explained, turning back to look at Martha, his usual 'enthusiastic babble' explanation somewhat tempered by his evident grief at the dying woman before them. "It generally just slows the aging of those who spend a prolong time in contact with me on the TARDIS- your body's probably only aged a few weeks for all the months you've spent with me-, but since Leela left me to stay on Gallifrey, prolonged exposure to so many bio-fields resulted in Leela's telomeres automatically replenishing themselves and thus halting the aging process in her body so long as she was on the planet; with Gallifrey gone…"

He sighed as his eyes turned back to study the woman before them, his expression grim as he studied her. "She's probably aging a year a day as her body tries to 'catch up' with what aging it hasn't been doing since I left her; no _wonder _the signal was so weak…"

"Si… signal?" Leela repeated, staring in weak confusion at the Doctor. "I… I sent no… signal…"

"Not _consciously_, anyway… and we don't have time for that now," the Doctor said, his resolve suddenly returning as he pulled out his sonic screwdriver and turned to Martha. "Martha, get ready to catch Leela; I'm shutting that thing down."

Martha didn't stop to question the Doctor; even without her time with him having increased her resolve to save lives, her medical training alone would have encouraged her to do what she could to help this woman. Quickly moving into the position that the Doctor had indicated, she held out her arms as the Doctor turned the screwdriver on the machine holding his old friend, the bonds around Leela's limbs automatically retracting as she fell forward into Martha's arms.

"To the TARDIS!" the Doctor yelled, hurrying towards his ship, Martha close behind him carrying the almost-frighteningly-light Leela. As she entered the ship, she briefly thought about asking the Doctor to wait and help the others, but a brief glance around the room was all that she needed to confirm that the other prisoners had already died; the fact that nobody had moved since their arrival made their status fairly self-evident.

As she entered the TARDIS, laying Leela down near one of the columns as the Doctor set the controls, Martha took one last brief examination of the older woman- breathing and pulse were slow but not in the danger area as of yet, and her pupils seemed to be reacting normally as far as Martha could tell without a torch- before she hurried over to join the Doctor just as he set the TARDIS to dematerialise.

"Where are you taking her?" Martha asked, the Time Lord intently staring at the central column as though trying to come to a decision. "I mean.... well, can you help her, or-"

"_I _can't do anything," the Doctor said, looking grimly over at Martha, "but I know someone who has access to the resources that _would _allow me to help her."

Before Martha could ask him what he meant, he pulled out his phone- as part of the 'being normal' thing he'd been doing since the Master's death Martha had insisted he get his own mobile, and he'd actually grown rather comfortable with it- and quickly dialled in a number before raising the phone to his ear.

"Jack?" he said, his tone brisk and direct as he addressed his old companion, "I'm going to need one of your stasis chambers; I've got a patient who needs some urgent treatment that's going to take longer to organise than I've got."

"Jack?" Martha repeated uncertainly as he terminated the call and turned his attention back to the TARDIS console. "You're going to _Jack _for help with this?"

"When I was asking him for more details about _his _Torchwood he mentioned that his base has various stasis chambers installed around it," the Doctor explained, looking anxiously over at Leela even as the TARDIS continued towards its destination. "If I can get Leela into one of those, it should keep her frozen in time long enough for me to sort out something that can help her..."

"Which is...?" Martha asked uncertainly.

"I'll get back to you on that," the Doctor said, even as he anxiously turned his gaze back towards Leela's still form. "Right now, that all depends on what Jack's team have pieced together over the years..."


	3. Analysis of a RiftRelated Nature

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AN: Just to clarify, for "Torchwood" this takes place shortly before the beginning of "Reset", while Owen's doing the autopsy- at around the same time as Martha showed up in the original episode, actually-; had to relocate the 'when' of those events a bit, but I wanted to explore the consequences of the Doctor and Martha's involvement in this particular crisis (Besides, the dating was confusing enough as it was; I was never entirely certain how long was it meant to have been since the Year That Never Was by the time Martha showed up at Torchwood, beyond the fact that it was long enough for her to finish her courses...)

AN 2: Bonus points to anyone who catches the partial quote from the classical series I included here

Old Faces, New Hopes

Even after he'd received the phone call, Jack was still somewhat stunned about how he was meant to react to this latest twist.

The Doctor was coming _here_?

After all the crap he'd gone through with Torchwood One when he'd run into them- just because he'd apologised to Jack at their last meeting didn't mean Jack was kidding himself into thinking that he'd completely forgiven Torchwood for what they'd done to him; trusting one person wasn't the same as trusting the group they belonged to-, Jack hadn't been expecting the Doctor to call the Hub directly unless he had to, even after giving the Time Lord his contact details...

So what had happened to change his mind?

More importantly, how was he going to explain this to the rest of his team, given that they were already dealing with enough problems in the form of that 'Meredith Roberts' woman who almost certainly _hadn't _been killed of a Weevil attack...?

"Jack?" Gwen's voice said from the door of his office, breaking his train of thought and prompting him to look up at her. "Are you all right?"

"Mmm?" Jack said, looking up at Gwen with a reassuring smile. "Yeah, I'm fine; just got a call that we've got a guest on their way."

"A... 'guest'?" Gwen repeated, her confusion evidently increasing as she stared at him. "Who-?"

Further questioning was cut off as the sound of the TARDIS materialising on the main floor of the Hub, prompting Jack to hurry out of his office just in time to see the Police Box he'd spent so long searching for since originally joining Torchwood materialising in the middle of his headquarters, followed by the door opening to reveal the Doctor and Martha standing there with an old woman in the Doctor's arms.

"Ah, Jack, good to see you," the Doctor said, looking up at him with a brief nod before he continued. "I need to borrow a stasis unit for the next few days; what's available?"

"I... _what_?" Doctor Owen Harper said, looking up sharply from the autopsy he'd been about to conduct at this latest proclamation; Jack vaguely registered Tosh looking at the Doctor in clear uncertainty about how to react to his presence, but otherwise Owen seemed to be dominating the current meeting. "Look, I don't know who you are, and I don't care _how _you know Jack, but you can't just come waltzing-"

"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said, turning to stare at Owen with the kind of intensity Jack hadn't seen the Doctor display since his previous body had vowed to rescue Rose from the Dalek Emperor's ship. "Trust me on this, Doctor Owen Harper; when I put my mind to it, there is _very _little I can't do... and what I want right now is use of your facilities for the next few days while I figure out how to save my friend, is that understood?"

Despite himself, Owen swallowed; he wasn't used to getting stared at with the kind of intensity that was currently being directed at him.

"Uh... right," he said, nodding in awkward confirmation.

"Good," the Doctor said, his glare fading into his usual slightly cheery smile as he glanced over at Jack, he and Gwen having come down to the main floor during the Doctor's brief chat with Owen. "Now then, Captain, if you could show me to your stasis chambers; Leela needs to get on ice as soon as possible."

"Right this way," Jack said, nodding at the Doctor as he turned around and began to walk towards the Hub's cryogenic storage area, the Doctor promptly following him with the old woman.

"So..." Jack said after they were out of earshot from the rest of the Torchwood staff, leaving Martha to answer any questions his team might have, "who's she?"

"An old companion of mine," the Doctor replied as they entered the cryo-chamber, Jack automatically walking over to open the nearest empty chamber he could find, allowing the Doctor to place the woman inside it. For a moment, he simply stood over the woman in silence, a contemplative expression on his face, until he leaned over and planted a brief kiss on her forehead, pulling back to look at her with an almost paternal affection.

"I'll help you, savage," he said simply. "I promise."

With that he shut the cryo-'shelf' and turned to face Jack, resolute once more. "Now then, could you show me to that 'Rift manipulator' thing you mentioned?"

* * *

"Hold on; _that's _the Doctor?" Gwen asked, looking incredulously at Martha. "As in, _Jack's _Doctor?"

"The one he was looking for, yeah," Martha replied, nodding back at Gwen while ignoring the brief sense of déjà-vu; she might have 're-met' most of the Doctor's past companions during the early Christmas celebrations they'd attended after that whole _Titanic _mess- they still kept in touch when they could; the age gap between her and most of them made it a bit odd at times when they'd had a few nights out together, particularly since none of them looked like each other enough to be related, but travel with the Doctor tended to reinforce the idea that age wasn't that important-, but meeting the Torchwood team outside of the Himalayas when they didn't remember the aid they'd given her during that year was still slightly unnerving. "And before you ask, if you don't know the answers already I'm not going to give them to you; that's something Jack should tell you himself."

"Cut a man off before he can get started, why don't you...?" Owen muttered, rolling his eyes as he turned back to the body behind them. "Honestly, first interesting bit of work in months, and-"

"Interesting in what way?" Martha asked, turning to look at the body lying on the table in the lowered area behind where the TARDIS had landed that looked like the facility's equivalent of an operating table. The body appeared generally unmarked, but Martha was willing to bet there was something strange about it.

"You mean, aside from the fact that it was found in the presence of a member of a rather ruthless alien race and doesn't appear to have actually been so much as _scratched_?" Owen answered, his tone making it clear he regarded her as a mere intruder into his domain. "Not much, really; I was just starting the autopsy when you-"

"Don't forget to check the bloodstream," Martha said, walking over to pull on a pair of operating gloves as she studied the body herself, noting a couple of interesting holes. "There's a couple of puncture marks here that look like they've been caused by a hypodermic needle..."

"Needles?" the Doctor's voice suddenly said, prompting Martha and Owen to spin around in surprise to see the Doctor standing above them, his glasses now on his face as he quizzically studied the body before them. "He was injected with something?"

"I was just about to take a closer look at that, actually," Martha replied, briefly pausing as something occurred to her before she looked back at the Time Lord. "Doctor, I know we came here for Leela, but..."

"The body's caught your interest, mmm?" the Doctor said, smiling slightly at Martha with a warm grin before his expression became more serious as he studied the still form on the autopsy table. "Trust me; from what I've heard from here, I wouldn't mind taking a closer look at this particular situation myself- when I'm not working on the Rift manipulator, of course-"

"_What_?" Toshiko said, turning around and walking away from her monitors to look sharply at the Time Lord incredulously. "You _can't_; that's-"

"Don't worry, I'm not going to do anything to _activate _the Manipulator- and I might actually need your help when it comes to that bit; Jack tells me you're the one who did most of the calculations to make that thing-; I just need to refine it to channel a bit of Rift energy to make sure it does what I want it to," the Doctor explained, walking around to stand in front of Toshiko with a reassuring look on his face. "Trust me, I appreciate your concern, but I know what I'm doing; so long as everyone involved is careful, this _should _work out well..."

For a moment Tosh and the Doctor simply stood in silence, the Asian woman looking reflectively at the man before her as though trying to determine what he was planning to do just from his features, before she finally sighed and nodded.

"Well..." she said at last, shrugging slightly as she looked at the Doctor, "if Doctor Shaw's reports about you were even _half _true, you probably know what you're doing."

"You read Liz's reports about me?" the Doctor said, suddenly smiling at Tosh with a renewed warmth. "You worked for UNIT?"

"Until they had me locked up after I was forced to steal plans for a sonic modulator to save my mother," Toshiko replied, her tone cold as she stared at the Doctor.

"Ah," the Doctor said, swallowing slightly uncomfortably at this latest news. "If it helps, I haven't really had much contact with UNIT in the last decade or so; I wouldn't have really known _anyone _involved in that particular state of affairs..."

Before the Doctor could say any more, Tosh simply reached over and patted him lightly on the arm, a reassuring, slightly teasing smile on her face.

"It's fine," she said simply. "Come on; let's get to work."

"And while you're at it, maybe you could see about giving us a tour of this place when we're done?" Martha called over, shrugging on a white lab coat as she turned her attention to the body on the table before her.

"After everything else you've both done for the planet?" Jack said, smiling as he looked between his old friends. "Trust me; there's _nothing _you could ask for that you wouldn't get- except Ianto, of course; I prefer him where he is."

"It's the coffee," Ianto said, shrugging slightly as the Doctor and Martha glanced over at him where he currently stood near the main door of the Hub, before he turned around and departed the room.

"Coffee?" the Doctor repeated, looking at Jack with a sceptical smile.

"He does make _really _good coffee," Gwen put in, although the teasing grin on her face made it clear that she knew what the Doctor was really asking.

"Ah," the Doctor said, nodding briefly in understanding before he shrugged and turned back to Tosh, evidently concluding that it was a conversation for another time. "So, getting back on topic, where's this Manipulator of yours?"

* * *

A couple of hours later, Martha found the Doctor and Tosh sitting in the Torchwood conference room, going over a wide variety of papers scrawled with all kinds of equations that reminded Martha of some of the physics papers she'd found in the TARDIS library while browsing through it on a few occasions (She'd initially been surprised at the amount of papers present in that area that had been published by a 'Dr. E. Shaw' given that the other names in the collection were people she could at least vaguely remember hearing about, but the later discovery that Elizabeth Shaw had been the Doctor's assistant during his original employment by UNIT had answered that question).

"Going well?" she asked, smiling slightly at her boyfriend- she wished she could come up with a better term for her relationship with the Doctor, but 'boyfriend', for all that it was slightly juvenile, did the job well enough- as he glanced up at her, an enthusiastic grin on his face.

"Brilliantly, thanks," he said, nodding in approval at the young Japanese woman. "Tosh here really knows her stuff; actually, turns out we met in my last body."

"Really?" Martha said, raising her eyebrows as she looked back at Tosh in surprise. "How'd that happen?"

"Oh, Owen was hung over on his first day and I had to cover an alien dissection in his place; the Doctor showed up to take a closer look at the body dressed in leather and with bigger ears and less hair," Tosh replied, a brief smile on her face that both of the other people in the room would bet was caused by the thought of Martha's fellow doctor- although a glance at the Doctor when describing his previous suggested that there was an element of amusement at comparing him to his other self involved as well- before she looked curiously at the other woman. "Talking of Owen, what did the dissection turn up?"

"Not much, unfortunately," Martha said, shrugging as she sat down beside the Doctor. "There _were _high traces of ammonium hydroxide in his system, but we can't determine much more than that; something seems to have wiped most of his medical records from the NHS."

"Really?" the Doctor said, his curiosity sparked as he looked at Martha. "That's an... odd way to kill, when you think about it."

"And the data crash seemed a bit odd, too; I'm not exactly a computer expert, but it seemed a bit too... specific to be an accident; a whole bunch of files seem to have lost the same bits of information in all kinds of databases," Martha said, looking over at Tosh again. "Actually, Owen suggested we should have you take a look at that later; the data loss looks a bit too _exact _to be an accident."

"I'll keep that in mind," Tosh replied.

"Thanks," Martha replied, before she turned back to look at the Doctor with a shrug. "Still, the dissection aside, they've really got some interesting stuff in here; Owen showed me some of the alien tech they've salvaged over the years."

"Oh, he showed you that 'singularity scalpel' he's been talking about?" Tosh asked.

"Singularity scalpel?" the Doctor repeated.

"It's this thing Owen discovered recently; it apparently concentrates energy on a fixed point of matter without damaging anything in between," Tosh explained. "He's been working on getting it working, but so far he apparently hasn't had much luck; the last time he tried to destroy a piece of paper in a cup he ended up vaporising something on the next desk over."

"Ah," the Doctor said, before he glanced over Martha's shoulder and noticed something. "Where's everyone else?"

"They left," Martha said. "The computer reported something about another hypodermic attack where the victim survived; Jack thought it would be better to catch up with what she had to say as soon as possible."

"Really?" Tosh said, looking up at Martha, a suddenly hurt expression on her face. "But..."

"He just thought that it would be better to let you focus on the situation here, given that you weren't actually needed out there; it's nothing personal," Martha said, looking reassuringly over at the other woman.

"Oh," Tosh said, simply nodding in response before she turned to the Doctor with a curious smile. "So... how _do _you know Jack?"

"Mmm?" the Doctor said, looking at Tosh in surprise. "Jack never mentioned that?"

"Apart from once telling Gwen that he was waiting for 'the right sort of Doctor', not really," Tosh replied, shaking her head before she looked between the other two people in the conference room with an eager curiosity. "So, how _did _you meet him?"

"Ran into him when he tried to con me into buying what he _thought _was a Chula medical ship back in the Second World War that turned out to not be _quite _as harmless as he thought it was," the Doctor replied, a slight smile on his face at the memory. "Jack helped me stop a bomb that was going to destroy the ship, and I ended up taking him along with me when his own spaceship was about to explode; he stuck around with me until we... went our separate ways after an incident with an alien invasion, and I didn't see him again until we ran into him here."

Tosh blinked.

"Jack... was _conning _you?" she asked.

"It was a long time ago by anyone's standards; even _before _we parted company, he'd come a long way from who he'd been before," the Doctor said, waving a hand reassuringly at Tosh before he turned back to the papers before them. "Anyway, getting back to the matter at hand, based on what you've got here, you've definitely got a good grasp of _how _to control the Rift; what's needed for this to work is the ability to refine that control by channelling Rift energy into a specific point..."

"Hold on; you need the Rift manipulator to channel the Rift's energy?" Martha asked, looking uncertainly at the Doctor. "I thought you said the TARDIS could use Rift energy for fuel; why don't you just use that if that's what you need?"

"The TARDIS absorbs Rift energy like a dam contains water, really; it absorbs the energy in quantities that are too large for me to use for what I've got in mind," the Doctor explained, tapping a couple of equations thoughtfully with his sonic screwdriver as he studied them. "On the other hand, the Rift Manipulator might be more basic than the TARDIS, but it's also capable of absorbing and channelling Rift energy to a finer degree; by establishing a containment buffer and temporarily reversing the polarity of the rift flow, we should be able to direct that rift energy to restore Leela's cells to their original 'default' age and then restore her traditional aging pattern."

Martha could only blink in astonishment at what the Doctor had just told her; the fact that Tosh appeared equally stunned was only a partial consolation at this point.

He was going to... _rejuvenate _Leela?

For a moment Martha wasn't sure how to respond to that; the fact that Leela had grown that old on Gallifrey probably had something to do with whatever he was planning, but the idea that he had a means of doing that to _anyone_...

Martha wasn't sure whether she should be terrified at the idea of that kind of power in anyone's hands or awed at the dedication he'd have to possess to be willing to use that power in this manner for a friend he probably hadn't seen in years-

The sound of the Hub doors opening diverted Martha's thoughts away from that issue and back to the more immediate matter of the case at hand.

Right now, they had a strange death to deal with; her thoughts about the lengths that the Doctor was willing to go to in order to help old friends could wait until later.


	4. DoctorTorchwood Collaboration

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise

Feedback: Feel free

AN: For clarification purposes, the scenes not shown here, such as the interviews with the victim's families, all happen the same way they did originally; no point going over EVERYTHING from the original episode when there's a central plot to attend to, after all

Old Faces, New Hopes

"So, Doc," Jack said as they sat in the conference room, the two men temporarily alone as the rest of the Torchwood staff prepared for the upcoming meeting, "apart from being an 'old companion', who is this 'Leela' chick you brought here?"

"Oh, she's an old friend of mine, as I said; we travelled together six bodies back and she helped me find out what had happened to my family three bodies later," the Doctor replied, grinning reassuringly at the immortal Time Agent as he sat back in his chair. "She married a Chancellory Guard back on Gallifrey, and went on to become the Presidential bodyguard to another old companion of mine, before..."

His voice trailed off as he spoke, the grin on the Doctor's face at the recollection of his past with Leela fading as he reflected on the realities of the situation he was now presented with in his relationship with his former companion.

"Before the Time War, huh?" Jack finished for the Doctor, looking solemnly at his old friend. "And... you want to get her back to the way she was?"

"Spending so long on Gallifrey essentially halted Leela's aging; with the Time Lords gone, her body automatically attempted to catch up with the years she'd lost," the Doctor explained. "I'm not talking about regressing her back to her old state of permanent youth; I just want to get her back to her original age so that she can live some kind of normal life now that Gallifrey's gone."

"Ah," Jack said, nodding slightly in understanding.

"So... this isn't an 'automatic fix' thing?" a voice said from the entrance to the conference room, prompting Jack and the Doctor to glance over to see Martha standing there, looking uncertainly at the Doctor.

"As in... am I just doing this because I don't want Leela to die?" the Doctor said, giving Martha a moment to nod in confirmation before he shook his head. "That's part of it, but if we were talking simple old age, I could leave it alone; the fact is that Leela's aged decades in a matter of days, and the life she had on Gallifrey during that time..."

He shook his head as he looked between his two friends, a grim expression on his face. "Leela's from a society of hunters and warriors with a definite need to help people; back when she was travelling with me, she was definitely one of the most physical companions I've ever had, and that lifestyle gave her skills that she was never able to use to their fullest extent on Gallifrey until the days leading up the war- which, I might add, only occurred around three _centuries _after Leela arrived there."

"Three _centuries_?" Jack repeated incredulously, only just stopping himself from making a comment about how he'd thought he looked good for his age; the Doctor definitely wouldn't appreciate comments like that at a time like this.

"Of doing virtually nothing that she could really use her skills for; marriage to Andred might have given her a chance to participate in training the Chancellory Guard, but Leela needs something more to give her a real sense of accomplishment, and she only really got _that _when she was helping Romana try and open up Gallifrey to the rest of the universe in the last couple of decades before the War started..." the Doctor said, smiling briefly at the memory of his old companions' efforts to help his home develop- the Inquisitor might have made things difficult but they'd done a good job before that mess with Pandora made things so difficult- before he continued. "The point is, by using the Rift energy to regress Leela back to her original age and restoring her ability to age normally, I'm giving her a second chance to live the kind of life she _wants_ to have; what she does afterwards is her decision alone."

"Ah," Martha said, nodding briefly at her boyfriend (A part of her couldn't help but wish that she had a better term for what she was to the Doctor- given that he'd been single for so long it felt as though she should have a better term for her relationship with him than 'girlfriend'-, but this wasn't the time for that thought right now) before the conference room doors opened and the rest of the Torchwood team walked in, taking up position around the conference table even as they shot brief, uncertain glances at the three already present.

"So..." Gwen asked at last, looking inquiringly at the three old friends, "anything on your minds we should know about?"

"Just brainstorming a couple of things about how to help Leela; nothing you need to worry about," the Doctor replied, shooting Gwen a brief smile of thanks before he turned back to Jack. "On with the meeting?"

"Of course," Jack replied, nodding over at Martha. "Martha Jones; you're up."

"Well," Martha said, as she looked around at the others, "the obvious question we had to deal with in these murders was why someone would use ammonium hydroxide to kill their victims; given the effects it has on the bloodstream, the obvious explanation is that the hydroxide isn't just intended to kill the victim, but to eliminate any evidence of something in the blood."

"I took a look at some of the NHS records that had been wiped," Tosh put in, taking up the explanation for her own activities in the current investigation; she might have only spent the last hour checking over those records, but an hour's analysis from Tosh was worth more than most people could accomplish in a day. "Most of the people whose records have been erased appear to have been killed in similar circumstances, in cases across the UK; the most likely explanation for the attacks is to destroy evidence of their medical condition."

"Right," Jack said, nodding briefly at his team. "Gwen, Ianto, continue to pursue the criminal investigation; Martha and Owen can follow up on the medical side. Tosh, any luck in retrieving those medical records?"

"Not yet," Tosh replied, shaking her head apologetically. "I've been working with the Doctor to see what we can find in the database when we can, but nothing's turned up yet; I'm going to have to dig deeper in the system's memories, see if I can find any remnants of deleted or temporary files."

"Do what you have to," Jack confirmed with a nod. "We're not dealing with a freak with some needle fetish; this is a conspiracy."

He glanced over apologetically at the Doctor. "Sorry, Doc; Leela's going to have to wait until we've got this whole situation straightened out..."

"Don't worry; Leela would understand," the Doctor said, nodding reassuringly at his friend with a brief smile. "She was always about helping others; besides, it's not like she's immediately going anywhere."

Only the regret in the Doctor's eyes reflected the fact that he evidently wished he could do more for his old companion than his current resources would allow; the reprogramming of the Rift Manipulator had almost certainly made progress, but it was probably nowhere near completion yet, and every minute he spent on something else- no matter how important it might be- was one more minute that Leela remained in stasis.

* * *

"I don't _believe _this..." the Doctor muttered, studying the bloodwork before him; with Martha and Owen out investigating the recent seizure suffered by the earlier victim- Gwen and Ianto were also attending to a few interviews just in case they could turn up further information about the victims-, and most of the equations he needed for the Rift Manipulator to do what he wanted it to do now completed, he'd volunteered to look over the bloodwork in case something came to him that human medical expertise might have missed.

"Problem?" Tosh asked, looking up from where she was studying the files herself.

"Just baffled at the relative... _randomness_ of these attacks, really," the Doctor replied. "I mean, putting aside the fact that the professional nature of the hits means that they were definitely done by an assassin of some kind, nothing else seems to tie them together beyond something in their medical history, and that's only a theory given that their medical history's actually been _erased_; we've still got no means of tracking the next victim."

"Owen did comment that the victims were so healthy it was abnormal; does that help?" Tosh asked.

"Trust me, I checked that out myself; everything you've got makes it clear that the more obvious theories about that don't work," the Doctor replied. "Telomeres are the expected length, so they're not clones; no traces of any of the traditional duplicate-creating radiations in their cells-"

"'Duplicate-creating radiations'?" Tosh repeated.

"I've encountered a couple of occasions where people have managed to make duplicates of human beings without the need of specific genetic samples via various methods; 'radiation' is just a generic term unless I think of something better to call it," the Doctor said, waving a hand dismissively before he tapped his fingers together in frustration as he studied the information he'd been going over. "The point is, according to every scan I can run, these people _are _the originals, but I just can't figure out what happened to them; this level of health _cannot _be natural in so many people..."

"Well, it looks like we have our common link between the victims," Jack's voice said from off to the side, prompting the Doctor and Tosh to glance over at the immortal man as he walked towards them with a slight frown on his face. "Apparently Barry- one of the earlier victims- was a former diabetic."

"_Former _diabetic?" the Doctor repeated, looking sceptically at Jack. "How is that even _possible _in this time?"

"No idea, but he's not the only one," Jack said, his expression grim as he looked between the two. "Martha just called to tell me that Marie- the woman who survived that last reported attack- used to have HIV before she took part in this clinical trial of a drug called 'Reset' from a place called 'the Pharm'... _right _before a swarm of insects came out of her body-"

"Insects?" the Doctor repeated, standing up seemingly automatically as he looked urgently at Jack. "Just to make sure, they're not telepathically communicating with each other or eating her body, right?"

"Uh... no," Jack said, looking uncertainly at the Doctor.

"Good; it's not the Hive, then," the Doctor said, sitting back down with a slight sigh.

"I take it the Hive isn't something we'd like to deal with?" Tosh asked.

"It was a telepathic swarm of flies that fed on carrion and triggered cycles of death and decay on a human colony in the far future before I managed to dispose of it," the Doctor replied, waving a brief, dismissive hand at Jack. "In any case, this definitely can't be it; the Hive would have nothing to gain by _healing _the host, which means we're going to need Martha and Owen's analysis before we try and figure out anything else about this 'Reset' thing..."

* * *

"So, we're dealing with an alien insectoid larva that incubates in human bodies but dies rapidly when outside a host?" the Doctor said, looking at Martha with a smile that conveyed both pride at her analysis and concern for its implications; the idea of a swarm of insects emerging from a corpse was far from a cheery thought under any circumstances, but the deaths just made it all the more concerning. "Can't think of many creatures that could do something like that..."

"Plus, there's this 'Reset' drug to take into account," Owen put in, shooting a brief glare at the Doctor and Martha before he returned his attention to the slide currently on display at the head of the conference table; evidently he wasn't entirely appreciative of the two new arrivals taking over his role in the team. "Based on the molecular remnants of the drug that we found in Marie's blood, Reset essentially operates like a computer virus scan for the body; it 'scans' its way through the files- or cells, in this case- and when it's found a virus- or any kind of harmful bacteria or toxins, apparently-, it basically deletes it; it's like the body's been reset back to its 'factory settings'."

"It's the ultimate 'magic bullet'," Martha continued, taking up the story once again. "Supersedes anything and everything else in the medical armoury to date."

"If it weren't for the fact that it includes a lethal alien parasite, I'd almost be impressed," the Doctor said grimly.

"And the parasite's responsible for the superior health experienced by the test subjects?" Tosh asked.

"Exactly," Martha confirmed. "It needs a healthy body to incubate, so the original egg includes this 'magic bullet' which puts everything back to normal."

"OK, so we've answered the 'who', what we need now is the 'why'," Jack said, looking over at Ianto. "Who runs the Pharm?"

"The public image is innocent enough," Ianto replied, studying the files in front of him. "Private-public partnership between the government and a consortium of the pharmaceutical companies, researching and developing cutting-edge biotechnology."

"Their IT systems are way more cutting-edge than they need to be," Tosh put in, taking up the explanation at her end. "Plus, they've got seemingly unrestricted security clearance."

"Hence the erased medical records?" the Doctor asked.

"That would be my guess," Tosh replied with a brief nod.

"Who runs this outfit?" Jack asked.

"Institute director is a Doctor Aaron Copley," Gwen put in, pulling a photograph of a tall, broad-shouldered man with a high forehead and a piercing stare dressed in a business suit.

"Yeah, I know his work," Owen said with a brief nod. "He's one of the most respected research scientists in his field.

"Harvard graduate," Ianto continued, studying some papers in front of him. "Did research at Cambridge; last job, Harvard Professor of Molecular Pharmacology, before he came to the UK to set up the Pharm."

"Definitely sounds like someone who could be worth a visit," the Doctor said, shaking his head grimly as he studied Copley.

Even if the man was human, why was it that so many people tried to use alien technology for a short-cut when they couldn't get around problems with their own technology? WOTAN and BOSS had been dangerous enough when they were designed purely by humans without any alien 'assistance', and he didn't like to think about some of the mistakes he'd encountered in the past with people trying to manipulate aliens for their own agendas...

* * *

AN 2: Classic Who update; the Hive was a swarm of telepathic, highly evolved insects from the far future that the Fourth Doctor encountered in the novel "The Well-Mannered War", which can be found on the BBC Doctor Who web site in EBook form in the 'Classic Series' section, while WOTAN- Will Operating Thought ANalogue- and BOSS- Biomorphic Organisational Systems Supervisor– were super-intelligent computers confronted by the First and Third Doctors in "The War Machines" and "The Green Death" respectively


	5. Plans and Dates

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise

Feedback: Feel free

AN: This takes place after Jack and Owen's failed attempt to gain access to the Pharm; as always, what you don't see happened the same way it did originally

Old Faces, New Hopes

"Didn't go well, I take it?" the Doctor asked Jack as he and Owen walked back into the Hub, both of them looking more than slightly frustrated; clearly their attempt to get a better look at what was going on in the Pharm hadn't worked out like they'd hoped it would.

"Well, we didn't get into the Pharm, Copley 'assured' us that there was nothing strange going on and that Whitehall would back him up if we attempted to gain access to the place, and scans of the facility showed the highest concentration of alien life this side of the Rift; I'd say I've had better," Jack replied with a brief nod before he turned to Tosh. "Any chance we could trick the systems into granting us access?"

"No luck," Tosh replied apologetically. "The Doctor and I have done what we could, but they're using some highly sophisticated firewalls; a brute-force approach would give us away and we don't anything else that could do the job."

"We need a way in there..." the Doctor muttered, shaking his head in frustration as he thoughtfully tapped his lips. "Preferably _not _something which involves me disguising myself as the cleaning-lady again..."

His voice trailed off as he noticed the rest of the room's inhabitants looking at him in surprise. "What?"

"You disguised yourself as a _cleaning lady_?" Martha repeated incredulously.

"It was back when I wore frills and velvet; I looked a bit more... _weathered _back then, and can we move on to the more serious matter at hand here?" the Doctor asked, waving aside his embarrassed flush as he waved a hand at a computer screen displaying various pieces of information about the Pharm. "According to this, the Pharm's advertising for volunteer test subjects, so if we can get somebody _inside _the facility-"

"No," Jack said, shaking his head as he looked pointedly at the Doctor. "It's a good idea, but we don't know enough about what's going on in there; there are too many variables, and this isn't the kind of situation you're used to dealing with-"

"Just because I _focus _on potentially world-ending cataclysms when you travelled with me doesn't mean I can't spare time for more minor things, Jack-" the Doctor began.

"Look, it doesn't matter anyway; no matter what we think of, there's really only one way we can get what we're after without anyone finding out," Martha cut in. "We need a medic who knows what to look for to go into the Pharm and scout it out, and since Doctor Copley already knows who Owen is, and any in-depth examination would give away that the Doctor's not human before he could actually find anything, I'm the only real candidate-"

"_What_?" the Doctor said, looking over at Martha incredulously. "Martha, you _can't_-"

"We both know I've been through worse, Doctor," Martha reminded him, looking back at him with a pointed small smile that simultaneously expressed satisfaction and a grim resolution. "Trust me; if I can handle that, I can handle this."

As the rest of the Torchwood team looked uncertainly between the two time travellers, the Doctor and Martha exchanged silent stares with each other for a while, before the Doctor walked over and brief wrapped his arms around Martha, before he pulled back to kiss her briefly on the lips.

"Be safe," he said simply.

"When am I not?" Martha replied with a slightly flirtatious grin.

"Jack-" Owen began, looking over at the ex-Time Agent uncertainly.

"Trust me, Owen," Jack said, nodding at the young medical student with a reassuring smile, "you can trust Martha to the ends of the Earth... as the Doctor and I can attest, really."

"Looking at more immediate issues," Martha said, clapping her hands sharply together as she looked around at the rest of the Torchwood staff, "what do we know about the place so I know what to look for when I'm in there?"

* * *

"Seriously; you called her _Samantha Jones_?" the Doctor said a few hours later as he sat alongside Tosh near the monitors which had earlier been displaying Martha's meeting with Doctor Copley; Martha had been provided with special contact lenses which would allow them to see what she saw while infiltrating the facility- using the assumed identity of creative writing student and ex-hepatitis sufferer Samantha Jones-, allowing the rest of the team to wait and watch what she was doing without anyone knowing.

"Is there something wrong with that name?" Tosh asked, raising a curious eyebrow as she smiled at the Doctor. The Doctor may have been spending most of his time here studying the equations the two of them had written out earlier for the Rift manipulator, but his interest in Martha's safety was undeniable; right now nothing much was happening apart from Martha settling in for the night, but Tosh had a feeling that once Martha began her investigation of the grounds- she and Ianto had gone over the blueprints for the Pharm before her departure- the Doctor would be studying the screens with the same intensity he was now showing the equations; spending time with Jack might have meant she was used to more flamboyant displays of affection, but that didn't mean the subtle signs shown by the Doctor and Martha had gone unnoticed either. "I mean, you and Martha _both _seemed to be a bit surprised by that choice of name..."

"Nothing _wrong_, exactly, it's just an odd coincidence," the Doctor replied with a brief smile. "I actually travelled with a Samantha Jones a couple of centuries back; the fact that you ended up choosing that name for Martha just strikes me as a bit... amusing, really."

"Really?" Tosh said, a slight smile on her face at the implausible coincidence the Doctor had just revealed. "What was she like?"

"Not like Martha, for one thing; blonde teenage environmentalist activist who became a bit of a political speaker after she left me," the Doctor replied, smiling slightly at the memory. "Lovely girl, of course, but her history was... complicated."

"Complicated how?" Tosh asked.

"Complicated," the Doctor said simply, before he sighed and stood up; his attempt to avoid an uncomfortable conversation was obvious, but Tosh didn't see any point in pressing him for information that he clearly didn't want to share. "Well, I'm just going to nip off and get some tea; might as well see if Ianto's as good at his job as everyone says he is."

For a moment after the Doctor walked off, Tosh simply sat in silence as she stared at the screen before Owen walked up behind her, two mugs of coffee in his hands.

"Getting along well with him, then?" he said, looking at her with a brief nod as he indicated the direction that the Doctor had just walked off in.

"After everything I read about him at UNIT?" Tosh said, smiling slightly back at her friend (Her time in UNIT might have _ended _badly, but what she'd read about the actions of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and his UNIT team during the seventies had left her wishing that she'd been able to work for them even _before _she'd read about the full extent of the Doctor's history). "It's... it's like meeting the guy you've read about and learning that for once he _isn't _all hype; he really _is _like everything you imagined..."

"Oh, he was like that in the UNIT files?" Owen said with a feigned nonchalance that did little to fool anyone who was really listening to him. "Cute, chatty, smart..."

"Actually, most of his official employment records describe him as a distinguished older man in velvet," Tosh cut in with a brief smile, enjoying the confused look on Owen's face as he turned around to stare at her in confusion. "He changes his face a lot, really; that face was just the one he had when he was regularly employed by UNIT, while all the others just dropped in now and again to help out. When I was with them UNIT had six different faces listed as the Doctor's identification pictures if you had the right clearance- and two we weren't meant to talk to because he wouldn't know us or something like that-, and I even ran into another one during that incident on your first day."

Owen blinked.

"There's _ten _of him?" he said incredulously.

"Yep," Tosh replied, unable to stop a slight smile on her face as she realised what she'd just said; she'd been spending too long 'geeking out' with the Doctor...

"Uh... so," Owen said, looking slightly awkwardly at her as something else seemed to occur to him, "what happened to that... pool tournament thing you were organising?"

"That?" Tosh said, looking back at him with a briefly amused smile. "It was never a tournament."

"What was it, then?" Owen asked.

"It was supposed to be a date," Tosh replied.

She wasn't sure precisely where that had come from- maybe her time with the Doctor and Martha had rubbed off on her already; the Doctor alone had a habit of saying what was on his mind, and Martha definitely didn't lack for nerve either-, but it was out in the open now, and all she could do was wait and see his reaction.

"Sorry?" Owen asked.

"I was asking you out on a date," Tosh replied.

"A... a date?" Owen repeated.

"You didn't realise?" she asked with a slightly sceptical smile.

"You and me?" Owen said; evidently he was in the stage where you try to determine if something's the case by asking it in a variety of different ways.

"Yeah."

"I see," Owen said, slightly uncertainly. "And... you still... want that?"

"Yeah," Tosh replied briefly.

"Right..." Owen said, his voice trailing off uncertainly.

For a moment, a momentary uncomfortable silence settled over the room as the two stared at each other (Tosh thought she saw the Doctor standing off to one side behind a few monitors out of the corner of her eye, but she couldn't be certain and concluded that it didn't matter; if he hadn't interrupted yet, he probably wasn't about to do anything until this was over).

"I just thought if we spent some time together, an evening-" she began at last, trying to defuse the suddenly uncomfortable situation that had settled over them.

"All right," Owen said.

Tosh could only blink.

"Sorry?" she said.

"Just do it," Owen replied.

"Are you being sarcastic?" she asked; after spending so long feeling uncomfortable about just the _idea _of asking Owen out, he was just... _accepting _this?

"No," Owen replied briefly.

"You're being polite," Tosh said, still unable to fully believe what she was hearing. "You'll stand me up-"

"I've just said yes, haven't I?" Owen replied; he actually sounded slightly offended at the idea that he'd do that. "One date, see how it goes, which might be nowhere."

"That's fine," Tosh said quickly. "A drink."

"OK."

"Yeah."

"And I'm going to keep flirting with people, OK?" Owen added, almost as an afterthought. "Just 'cause of this, doesn't mean I'm going to stop flirting."

"You can be king of flirts," Tosh replied with a broad grin; in the long run, she could accept Owen still flirting with others so long as he was staying with her at the end of the day.

"OK," Own said after a brief pause. "We should... concentrate on Martha."

"Yeah," Tosh replied, turning back to the monitor as the Doctor walked out, smiling nonchalantly at them as he placed three cups on the desk in front of the monitors.

"All good here?" he asked, a casual smile on his face that made it impossible to be sure if he was genuinely interested in learning the truth or was merely feigning ignorance for their sake.


	6. Saving Martha

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise

Feedback: Feel free

AN: All scenes at the Pharm prior to the team's arrival will be unaltered; it's what's happening OUTSIDE the Pharm that will be more interesting

Old Faces, New Hopes

As the Doctor sat impatiently behind the Torchwood team while staring at the monitors- there was nothing he could immediately contribute at this point so he was deferring to their superior expertise at dealing with this kind of situation-, he tried to stop himself impatiently tapping something as they did their job. Guiding Martha in accessing the Pharm's database had been straightforward enough, and the subsequent information they'd downloaded about the 'mayflies' looked like it would be promising reading, but with a potential break-out taking place while she was wandering about the headquarters of a man willing to kill people to conceal evidence of a medical treatment that all evidence suggested had so far proven fatal to everyone who used it anyway...

The Doctor just hoped that Jack's faith in Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones proved justified; the last thing he wanted was to learn that Elin Morgan had died because he was more focused on one life over another (He knew that it was illogical to be contemplating blaming herself for Elin's death before it had even happened when he probably wouldn't be able to contribute anything useful anyway, but he couldn't help it; too long since he'd spent any time working _with _anyone like this had left him with a somewhat obsessive need to be protecting people himself, he supposed)...

Then Martha ran through the temporarily-opened gate into the restricted section of the Pharm- in the direction of the alarms blaring warnings about an escaped hostile- and the Doctor's hearts momentarily felt like both of them had stopped.

"What the hell is she doing?" Owen asked, staring in frustration at the screens as Martha ran down the side of the main facility. "The Pharm's got their own hitman; God knows what they'll do to her..."

"That's Martha for you," the Doctor said, his tone a grim combination of admiration and frustration. "When she gets it into her head to do something- in this case, get a better look at what's in there- there's no stopping her."

"True..." Jack muttered, exchanging brief glances with the Doctor as they remembered the events that had shaped Martha's life for the year that nobody else now remembered...

Then, just as the Doctor was starting to relax about the situation- it wasn't perfect, but Martha seemed to have evaded detection for the most part- the screens displaying her view from the contact lenses suddenly went white.

"Shit!" Owen muttered.

"What was _that_?" the Doctor asked, his gaze automatically shifting to Toshiko.

"Radiation surge; we've lost the signal," Tosh replied, looking grimly back at the Doctor and Jack before she returned her attention to the screens before her, rapidly tapping the keyboard. "I can't get the signal back...."

The Doctor's eyes widened in horror.

_No_...

Martha was trapped in the Pharm, contact with them had been cut off, and everything he'd been hearing about Doctor Copley did _not _encourage comfort in the current crisis...

"That's it," he said simply, turning around and heading for the TARDIS as he pulled out his key. "I'm going in."

"Hold on; you're _what_?" Owen said, as he and Tosh turned around sharply to look at the Doctor, Jack simply walking off to his office. "You can't just drive up there-"

"I'm not going to _drive _up there, Doctor Harper; I'm taking my ship," the Doctor said, opening the door to the TARDIS before turning back to look at Torchwood's doctor and technician. "You can come with me if you want, or you can stay here; either way, I'm going in there _now_."

"You sure about this, Doctor?" Jack asked as he walked out of the office, now wearing his traditional coat. "I mean, from what I've heard you're a bit out of practise-"

"Given what we've seen of Copley's methods, I doubt he'll do anything to Martha that quickly; if we move _now_, we can get there in time," the Doctor said, hoping that he was as accurate as he claimed; as Jack had pointed out, his piloting skills were a bit out of practise after spending so long at the school, but with Martha's TARDIS key to 'home in on' at the other end of their imminent 'trip', coupled with Tosh's maps of the Pharm, he should be able to land somewhere suitable in time. "You can come with me or stay here, whichever you want; if you're coming, get what you might need and go."

Owen and Tosh only needed to exchange brief glances before they were on the move, Owen grabbing a couple of pieces of equipment while Tosh picked up her laptop, their evident confusion at the Doctor's actions pushed aside by their equally-evident faith in Jack.

"Right then," the Doctor said, stepping into the TARDIS and waving them inside. "Allons-y, everyone, and don't forget your phones!"

* * *

Even when he found himself standing outside the Pharm mere moments later, Owen couldn't entirely believe it.

The fact that they'd reached the Pharm in a matter of seconds was just about possible- teleportation might not be something he'd experienced that much, but he was aware that it was possible in theory if nothing else-, but the thought of a small box containing... _that_...

"It's... it's..." he muttered, wishing he could say something clearer.

"Yeah, I know; brilliant, isn't it?" the Doctor said, shooting a brief smile at Owen as he gave the box in question a brief pat before he turned to Jack. "Well, it's your team, Captain; what's your decision?"

"Right," Jack said, nodding briefly at the Doctor. "Doctor, you and Owen go after Martha; Tosh and I will see what we can find out in Zone A."

No sooner were the instructions issued than the two groups were heading in their respective directions, Owen and the Doctor entering the main Pharm facility while Jack and Tosh headed for Zone A.

"Where to now?" Owen asked, pulling his gun out of his medical bag- the Doctor had declined any offer of weapons and Jack hadn't pressed him on it- as they entered the building, glancing over at the Doctor; he had a couple of possibilities in mind, but he had to admit that he was rather interested in seeing this 'Doctor' in action after everything he'd been hearing lately...

"The treatment room," the Doctor said decisively as he headed off down a nearby corridor, his long brown coat billowing behind him in a manner that might have seemed overly dramatic but nevertheless seemed to work for him. "Copley might be a lunatic, but he's a lunatic scientist; in my experience, these people always prefer live test subjects over corpses..."

Owen didn't stop to ask what kind of people the Doctor had encountered to gain that kind of experience; he wasn't sure he wanted to know anyway. After only a few minutes of walking through the Pharm's complicated system of corridors- the man must have some kind of super-alien-memory; he could barely have done more than _glance _at the blueprints with all the time he'd spent working on Rift equations with Tosh and he already seemed to know the layout of the place at least as well as the people who'd actually been there would-, the Doctor paused outside a door, pressing his ear up against it and waving Owen over to do the same.

"...radiation that's not found in the temporally stable environment of Earth," a voice that Owen recognised as Doctor Copley's said, sounding frustratingly smug as he spoke; noting the Doctor's clenched fists, Owen had a feeling that his strange new... colleague- the Doctor had really spent more time talking with Tosh and Jack more than him, so it didn't feel entirely right calling him a friend given the relatively limited time they'd spent together- was going to have _serious _words with Copley when they got through this door.

"I don't know what that means," Martha's voice replied, only a slight tremor betraying her fear at the current situation.

"We've dealt with aliens before," Copley continued, his tone the even, measured tone of a man who was hovering at least close to the wrong side fo the line between genius and madness, "but we have never come across anything as exotic as you. A human being who's travelled in time and space. Tell me about it. How is that possible? What did you see out there?"

As though that was his cue, the Doctor suddenly pulled a small silver tubular device with a blue light on it out of his pocket, aimed it at the door-handle, and then casually walked into the room, revealing Copley and a dark-skinned woman, both in white lab coats, standing over Martha as she lay strapped down to a cross-shaped examination table, her expression of confused terror fading into relief as she saw the Doctor.

"If you want the answers to _that _question, that's the kind of thing I'm better suited to answer, really," the Doctor said, smiling grimly at the two doctors as Owen trained his gun on them. "I'm the Doctor, this is Doctor Owen Harper, and I would _really _appreciate it if you didn't do what you're planning on doing."

"And I should do this when my staff and I are on the verge of the greatest medical breakthrough-?" Copley began.

"You are on the verge of _nothing_, Aaron Copley," the Doctor cut in, walking forward to stand directly in front of the other man, meeting Copley's eyes with a cold stare that left Owen unnervingly reminded of all the reports he'd read about the Doctor's age being somewhere in his second millennium with its sheer intensity. "You have killed innocent people to cover up your mistakes, you have abused innocent creatures in the name of your own success, and you have done so for _no _other reason than your desire to take a short cut to knowledge that your civilisation is in _no _way ready to develop on its own."

"And what gives you the right-?" Copley began.

"The fact that he's the _reason _my cells are like this?" Martha cut in, glaring at Copley from the operating table as fear was replaced by hostility in the wake of the Doctor's arrival and the safety offered by his presence. "Trust me, _Doctor _Copley; you do _not _want to get on the Doctor's bad side."

Copley's eyes widened slightly as he stared at the Doctor.

"An _alien_..." he whispered, before his eyes flickered in Owen's direction and confusion settled in. "And you're working for Torchwood?"

"I'm working _with _Torchwood, Copley; the difference between the two situations is distinct," the Doctor countered, his hands in his pockets as he stared at the man before him (He vaguely registered that the fourth person there had vanished, but he wasn't that concerned about it; Copley was the real problem right now). "You might be intelligent enough to devise a means of using the mayflies to treat diseases even if you lack the means to put your plans in practise yet, but I can assure you that you have _no _idea what you're doing."

"Got that right," Owen said, the Doctor looking over at the Torchwood employee as he removed his hand from his earpiece. "Just got a message from Jack; the Pharm's been using captured aliens for the exotic chemical products they metabolise."

Noting the Doctor's suddenly shaken and grim expression, Owen felt obligated to continue. "He and Tosh are already initiating a total shutdown; from what he's seen, anything in there's beyond help after what they've done."

"I don't need to debate medical ethics with you-!" Copley began.

"Funny thing about people who preach about 'medical ethics'," the Doctor spat, staring at Copley as he walked over to undo the straps holding Martha to the 'table'. "The really _brilliant _private ones seem to have so little of their own."

"I was trying to understand the Mayflies' life cycle-" Copley protested.

"Anything that requires innocent people to die can _never _be worth it," the Doctor retorted.

"Some things are worth a few sacrifices, _Doctor_," Copley said, making it clear that he had strong doubts that the man before him had earned that title. "You should understand that-"

"Funny thing about what I 'understand'," the Doctor said, his eyes once again fixed directly on Copley's as he slowly walked towards the physically older man, Copley beginning to back away almost without realising it. "I am _fully _aware that sacrifices can be necessary sometimes, Doctor Copley... but I can assure you of two things; your research will _never _be acceptable, and your facility _will _be closed down before this night is over."

"In your dreams," Copley retorted with a brief shake of his head. "This is a state-of-the-art official facility-"

"You're assuming we'll be shutting you down with memos," Owen said, smiling grimly as Copley as he undid the last of Martha's straps, the Doctor walking over to hug Martha as Owen walked around the table to address the other doctor directly. "Right now my boss and my colleague are in your IT systems and wiping every last databank you've got."

"That's cyber-terrorism-" Copley began.

"Just the beginning," Owen continued, indicating his earpiece with a casual smile. "From what I'm hearing, we're working to trip your safety systems, cutting your power, and flooding everything that seals itself off with inert gasses-"

"The aliens will die-" Copley practically growled.

"If Jack says they're beyond help, they're beyond help," the Doctor stated simply, helping Martha to her feet as he looked grimly at Copley. "Sometimes, all we can do is put the victims out of their misery before it becomes truly unbearable."

"For God's sake, Doctor Harper, we're on the same side-!" Copley hissed.

"I stop hostile aliens and you exploit innocent arrivals; it's _not _the same," Owen said, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the other man.

"Add in the fact that you tried to use a friend of mine as your latest 'guinea-pig'," the Doctor interjected, walking up to Copley with a resolved expression, "and be grateful that I prefer more subtle means of insuring you're not going to be a problem."

Before Copley could react, the Doctor had reached up with one hand and gripped an area on Copley's shoulder with what Owen could have sworn was a Vulcan nerve pinch, Copley subsequently collapsing to the ground in an unconscious heap.

"Venusian aikido?" Martha asked, looking up at the Doctor with a slight smile.

"Yep," the Doctor confirmed, smiling back at her with a grateful grin of his own. "Not my strong point when I'm in action these days, of course, but given how quiet it was right now I felt fairly certain I could do it."

"Right..." Owen said, looking uncertainly down at Copley before he looked back at the Doctor. "So... he's unconscious, then?"

"Yeah, but probably best to tie him up or something; it's been a while since I did that and I don't know how long it'll last," the Doctor said, waving a hand briefly at Copley before he turned to walk out of the lab, his arm around Martha's shoulders. "We'll just make sure everything's been wiped in Copley's office; see you later!"

Even as he knelt down to tie Copley's hands together with some of the tubing that had been used for the IVs earlier, Owen's brief glance at the expression on the Doctor's face as he and Martha left the lab left him fairly certain that the two of them were going to be engaging in at least a few minutes of more 'physical' activity before they got on with their jobs...

Still, after what had nearly happened to Martha, Owen was hardly going to begrudge the Doctor a chance to spend a little time with the woman he loved to enjoy the fact that she was still alive; he'd worry about it if he needed to, and otherwise he'd just leave it alone.

* * *

AN 2: Well, hope you liked that; I _was _going to have a scene involving the Doctor saving Owen by shooting Copley's bullet out of the air (He _could _do it, I assure you; the Eighth Doctor pulled it off in the novel "Trading Futures"), but I realised when writing this chapter that there was no way Copley could get away to shoot Owen like he did originally, so I decided to leave that idea alone.

Anyway, it's back to Leela's fate next chapter; hope you all enjoy it!


	7. Leela Restored

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise

Feedback: Feel free

AN: The 'metamorphic symbiosis regenerator' seen here featured in the Fifth Doctor tale "Mawdryn Undead", where they were revealed to be Time Lord technology used to help stabilise Time Lords after dangerous regenerations; eight criminals had somehow managed to steal the regenerators from Gallifrey but were subsequently left trapped in a state of perpetual bodily regeneration due to their lack of understanding of the equipment (I'm naturally assuming that the Doctor will be able to use them more effectively than Maqdryn and his associates did)

Old Faces, New Hopes

A couple of hours later, the staff at the Pharm having been evacuated and the alien corpses having been recovered from the facility to be disposed of later, the Torchwood staff were back in the Hub, going over the last bits of business from the previous days' work.

"So, the hitman the Pharm hired to do their dirty work... died as a result of mayfly infection?" Jack asked, looking slightly uncertainly at Gwen and Ianto before turning to where Owen, Martha and the Doctor sat opposite. "Is that possible?"

"With what we've got of their biology, it _could _work; with the injections he was using, it's possible that he ended up inhaling some of the mayfly larvae the patient expels at the moment of death and didn't know what had happened to him until then," Owen said, shaking his head slightly at the thought. "God... if we hadn't been careful, that could have happened to me and Martha..."

"As it is, however, it didn't; no point dwelling on the 'could-haves', right?" Martha said, she and the Doctor exchanging knowing glances that only the two of them could know the meaning of; there'd been more than the occasional moment when he'd been feeling particularly depressed over his self-perceived failure to stop the Master's schemes during the Year, and Martha had always been there to help him through it.

"On the topic of 'could-haves'," the Doctor put in, "I take it that the fire we started there will have dealt with any of the... remains... at the Pharm?"

"Nothing distinctive could have come through that fire," Jack said, nodding in grim understanding at his old friend. "Don't worry about it; there's nothing there that anyone can use to start this up again."

"Good..." the Doctor said, a saddened expression briefly crossing his face at the thought.

"We can't save everyone," Gwen put in, looking over at the Doctor with a brief smile. "Trust me; if we could have saved anyone in there, we would have."

"We're not like Miss Hartman's Torchwood, Doctor," Ianto said, prompting the Doctor to glance up at him with a somewhat pointed stare at the reference to the woman who'd caused him so much heartsache due to her inability to accept when she should leave things alone. "We'll do what we can to help anything that isn't actively trying to kill us... and we _definitely _won't exploit them."

For a moment, the Doctor and Ianto simply stared at each other, both of them clearly remembering the woman who'd done so much damage to both their lives- even if Jack was the only person who knew precisely what the Doctor and Ianto shared in common; Rose and Lisa were private issues that they should only bring up if _they _wanted to-, before the Doctor stood up, a slight smile on his face as he looked at the people around him.

"Anyway," the Time Lord said with a slightly forced cheer, "with that dealt with, and on the topic of preventing needless deaths... would you all care to assist me in restoring an old friend to the age she's used to?"

Both the Doctor and Jack couldn't help but share a satisfied grin at the automatic assent that came from everyone around the table at that suggestion; after so long dealing with various alien races who regarded mankind as primitive barbarians, it was always nice to witness moments like this when a relatively random group- particularly one that, by its very profession, sometimes had to cause death on a semi-regular basis- showed their willingness to preserve even the life of someone they didn't know.

* * *

"You're _sure _this is going to work, Doctor?" Jack asked, looking uncertainly at his old friend as the two of them stood in the Torchwood 'medical area', looking silently at the still figure of Leela lying on the new 'bed' before them, the traditional Torchwood operating table having been replaced by a longer 'table' standing on its end with a skin-coloured 'cushion' where the person lay, with cables connecting to a triangular headrest and two light purple tubes surrounded by small silver circles on either side, the table connected up to both the Rift manipulator and the TARDIS via two cables stretching towards the objects in question (The Doctor had called it a 'metamorphic symbiosis regenerator', used by Time Lords to help them through particularly difficult regenerations; apparently he'd salvaged it from a derelict at some point, although he'd been forced to connect it up to the TARDIS to accommodate the missing control systems for this procedure). "I mean, Leela's not a Time Lord-"

"Trust me Jack, I know what I'm doing," the Doctor said, tapping the side of the chamber with the sonic screwdriver even as he crossed the fingers of his left hand where it was currently inside his pocket and hoped that he was being accurate. "Now, these things normally operate by helping to stabilise the Time Lord's cells after sustaining serious cellular damage- I've suffered from something like that twice myself; the first time I needed an old friend's help to get the process started but the second time I was able to wait the worst of it out in the TARDIS while everything straightened out on its own-, but I've modified this chamber to instead regress Leela's cells by filtering the Rift energy from there-" he indicated the cable leading from the pod to the Rift manipulator, "and channel it into Leela's cells using the equations Tosh and I developed. With the Rift energy combined with the residual artron energy in Leela's cells from her time with me, her body should automatically revert back to the age she was at when she first began to travel with me as the Rift energy 'stabilises' her body back at that point- thus erasing all traces of the excess bio-field radiation from her system and allowing her to age normally- while leaving her mind untouched; the regenerator only targets the cellular structure while allowing the neural cells to adjust at their own pace-"

"Hold on; 'adjust at their own pace'?" Jack repeated, seeking clarification on that issue; the idea of doing anything to _anyone _that required their brain to 'adjust' didn't appeal to him after so long spent unaware of what had happened to his own brain.

"I did say these were designed to help _regenerating _Time Lords, Jack," the Doctor pointed out, glancing over at his friend with a brief glare. "The designers wanted to ensure that _nothing _these things did could affect the developing personality in its nascent stages in any way, shape or form- a few externally-induced regenerations might be able to 'tweak' a few basic personal details but that's about it; I've sometimes wondered if they gave my third body a greater inclination to obey authority but that's all guesswork-; they didn't want to create the temptation that some politically-minded groups might try and enforce their own vision of things, not that it stopped anyone doing it the old-fashioned way..."

"OK," Owen said, breaking off the Doctor's train of thought before Jack could ask for further details, the doctor and Martha walking over to join Jack and the Doctor, "Tosh is just directing Gwen and Ianto to make sure that everything's set up the way everything says it should be; once she gives the all-clear, all we need to do now is turn everything on and keep our fingers crossed."

"Right then," the Doctor said, glancing over at Tosh as she gave him a quick thumbs-up from where she had just finished examining the Rift manipulator, "here goes nothing."

Even as the Doctor turned to enter the TARDIS, however, he paused mid-step, turning back to look at the woman lying on the table before him, still dressed in the tattered remnants of her Gallifreyian robes- he hoped he still had some of her old things in the wardrobe somewhere; he tried not to delete anything left by his companions, but the damage caused by the biodata virus infection and Marnal's exploding cold fusion reactor certainly hadn't made it easy- and laying a hand on her cheek.

"Be well," he said simply, before he turned back around and entered the TARDIS.

A few moments later, the Rift Manipulator began to hum as the tubes on either side of the 'bed' began to glow, orange energy crackling along the two cables from the TARDIS and the Manipulator towards the regenerator, surrounding and enveloping Leela's body as the Doctor, Martha, and the Torchwood staff watched, the wrinkles, thinness, and grey hair of age being replaced by smoother skin, a stronger body, thick brown hair... the body of a warrior tempered by experience and knowledge far beyond what her original people could have ever experienced...

_

* * *

_

Come on

... the Doctor thought to himself, his fingers crossed as he stared at the sight before him, his old companion growing younger as he watched her. _Please make it, Leela... _please_..._

If it had been any other situation where he'd discovered a companion like this, the Doctor liked to assure himself that he would never have attempted what he was doing at this moment...

But this wasn't just _any _companion; this was _Leela_.

He'd unintentionally ruined her peoples' way of life when he'd improperly programmed Xoanon, and while she might have enjoyed her time with him her time on Gallifrey had been far from a complete picnic due to her status as an 'outsider' even BEFORE she'd become caught up in that whole mess with the Agency trying to find out about his past...

If he could do anything to make up his past foolishness to Leela, this was his best means of doing so.

He just wished that he could be more certain that these regenerators would do the trick; even with the Rift Manipulator equations calculated so precisely that not so much as a single excess _atom _of Rift energy could get into Leela's system, there was always the risk that this technology wouldn't do what the Doctor had tried to program it to do...

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity to the Doctor, the process ceased and the energy faded from around Leela, leaving her the same young warrior-'savage' she'd been back when he'd first met her on Xoanon's planet all those long centuries and bodies ago... the girl who'd continued to defy Magnus Greel even as he threatened to kill her in a manner she couldn't understand... the warrior who'd survived all the traps and challenges that the Lentic Empire had left behind for the insane Sozerdor to use... the woman who'd risked everything to help him get the treatment he needed to save himself from the Swarm...

"Did it work?" Martha asked, shaking him out of his train of thought; it was only when he looked back at the rest of the group that he realised he'd been so caught up in his memories that he'd forgotten to actually get Leela out of the regenerator in the first place.

"Oh... right," he said, shaking his head briefly as he returned his attention to the matter before him, walking up to the generator to examine the read-outs on a screen on the side. "Well, according to this everything's fine; we just need to-"

"Ugh..." the woman lying on the 'bed' muttered, raising her head slightly as she blinked at her surroundings. "What... wh... where am I?"

The Doctor couldn't help but smile slightly as he walked around to stand in front of his old companion, even as the faint trace of tears began to brim in the corner of his eyes.

"Hello, savage," he said with a smile, reaching up to gently caress her cheek as she stared at him, eyes so used to being weakened by age- and with some slight scar tissue around them, he noted; he wondered what had caused that- having some slight trouble adjusting to the new, more vibrant light before they settled on him. "It's me."

"D... Doctor?" Leela whispered as she stared at him, her eyes flicking from him to the TARDIS where it was positioned behind him, her gaze growing ever wider as she took in the sight of two things she'd clearly never expected to see again...

"Yeah... it's me," the Doctor said, nodding briefly at her. "It's been two bodies since we last met... but it's me."

As though those words had been a signal that she'd been waiting for, Leela leapt forward, wrapped her arms around the Doctor, pressed her face against his shoulder, and began to cry, the Doctor's arms automatically tightening around the now-young woman as he cried himself, both of them lost in the memories of the planet and people that they had known and lost so long ago, the Torchwood team and Martha unable to do much more than simply look on in silence as the two old friends shared their grief over the loss of their birth and adopted home planet.

* * *

AN 2: To any Leela fans out there, I KNOW she's a bit OOC right now, but she's been through a lot since we last saw her in "Gallifrey: Panacea" (The precise details of which I'll be covering in the next chapter), so now seems as good a time as any to allow her to let it all out while she's still emotionally drained from what she's been through; she'll be back to some degree of normal next time


	8. Sharing the Pain

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise

Feedback: Feel free

AN: Hope everyone likes my explanation for Leela's survival; it's based on her final appearance in the "Gallifrey" miniseries, where Leela, Romana, K9, and their assorted allies were faced with the task of stopping an insane Time Lord from reaching Gallifrey in a TARDIS carrying several rapidly-decaying temporal weapons and a virus that would destroy the Time Lords' ability to regenerate

AN 2: The bit where Leela talks about instinct being more necessary than vision was inspired by the concept of slipstream piloting in "Andromeda", where slipstream- a sub-level of the universe that served as the Andromdea-verse's method of faster-than-light travel- could only be properly navigated by an organic pilot 'choosing' the correct paths (Even the series itself admitted that it was unclear why organic pilots were better at this than A.I.s, but that essential premise is the reason Leela was selected)

Old Faces, New Hopes

After a few moments in which the two old friends simply stood there sobbing- Martha and the Torchwood team having retreated to the conference room to give them some privacy-, Leela pulled back from the Doctor, her face still slightly wet from her tears as she looked him over.

"You have... regenerated?" she asked, smiling slightly at him.

"Twice since we last met," the Doctor replied with a nonchalant shrug even as he continued to grin at her. "It's... it's good to see you, Leela."

"You as well... Doctor," Leela replied, her gaze slightly wistful as she looked at him before another thought occurred to her. "Is... is Romana well?"

"Romana?" the Doctor asked, only just able to push his regret aside in favour of his curiosity; he'd known that Leela hadn't been involved in the events on Gallifrey from Romana's second regeneration onwards, but facts about the mess that Gallifrey had become during his time in the universe of anti-time had been rather hard to come by. "Leela... she's gone."

Leela blinked.

"Wh... what?" she whispered, her eyes wide as she looked at him. "But... but if _you _are here like this... the Free Time virus..."

"Free Time?" the Doctor repeated, looking uncertainly at his friend. "Hold on, I heard a bit about them... weren't they some kind of terrorist organisation that objected to us monopolising time travel?"

"Yes..." Leela replied, nodding at him. "Did Romana tell you... about the virus?"

"Weeeeell, more like I... picked up some bits as I went along; it was meant to make people susceptible to Free Time's influence but turned the infected into zombies, right?" the Doctor asked, unable to stop the sorrow on his face as Leela nodded. "Oh no... Leela, I am _so _sorry-"

"There was nothing... you could have done... to help us, Doctor," Leela said, shaking her head reassuringly at him as she held up her hand to halt him mid-sentence. "Even when I did not understand the specifics... of the trouble Romana faced, I understood... that it was not something you could have helped us with. This was a conflict of ideologies... of the old Gallifrey of Darkel and Pandora... against the Gallifrey Romana sought to create... and neither was _wrong_; you could have done nothing..."

"Doesn't mean I don't wish I _could _have been there..." the Doctor muttered, even as the brief smile of gratitude he gave his fourth incarnation's old companion made it clear that he was grateful for her reassurance.

He couldn't change what had been, but that still left them the future to deal with; the trials and failures of the past weren't worth brooding over at a time like this.

"So... what happened?" he asked at last, briefly racking his brain for the memory of what he'd read during those last few hours on Gallifrey before he continued. "According to the last records I found on the topic- things got a bit... complicated... when I got back; didn't have time to read the whole thing in detail-, there was an outbreak of the virus on Gallifrey?"

"There was," Leela replied, nodding in confirmation at him. "Romana, her K9 and I were trapped in Irving Braxiatel's old storerooms while a war-TARDIS carrying temporal weaponry and piloted by two recent victims of the virus was on a collision course towards Gallifrey, and the only direct means of time-travel that we possessed was a damaged Timescoop. Braxiatel and Romana were able to take parts from the Timescoop and combine them with K9 to allow him to travel in the time vortex to pursue the TARDIS, but a pilot was required for accurate control..."

"And you volunteered?" the Doctor finished for her.

"Piloting K9 in that fashion was described as needing instinct rather than vision... and Romana said that I possessed the greatest instinct of any she had ever known," Leela replied, a slight smile at the memory before she continued speaking. "With K9's senses already connected to the TARDIS we were tracking... I was able to successfully follow the temporal trail the ship had created to find it before it could reach Gallifrey. K9 was able to knock the TARDIS off-course from Gallifrey long enough for the temporal weapons on board to decay and destroy the ship while it was in orbit... but the resulting explosion separated me from K-9, and the next thing I recall is being awake on the Z'nai ship... with my vision restored-"

"Restored?" the Doctor repeated, holding up a hand as he looked urgently at her. "As in, you were _blind _at one point?"

"I had an... accident... involving a bomb detonation near a supply of artron energy; the doctors told me that my eyes were gone from me forever, and I still do not know what restored it," Leela replied, shrugging slightly as she looked at the Doctor. "And from there... well, that is all I really remember until you rescued me."

For a moment there was only silence as the two old friends looked at each other, neither of them willing to broach the topic that they both knew they had to acknowledge, until Leela finally spoke.

"What... happened, Doctor?" she asked, looking uncertainly at him. "The last time I saw you, you had exiled yourself to the realm of anti-time..."

"Well, long story short, I was purged of the Zagreus energies early on in my time there; came back to this universe after I learned what had happened to me and left the Zagreus parts of me back where they belonged," the Doctor said with a casual shrug.

"Ah," Leela said, before taking a breath to steady herself before she asked the main question. "And... Gallifrey?"

"Right..." the Doctor said, nodding thoughtfully for a moment before he smiled briefly at her. "Well, on an immediate note, I can tell you that Romana's plan to stop the TARDIS worked; Romana must have managed to recover K9 at some point after the two of you were separated, because last time I saw him he was living with a couple of friends of mine as my housewarming present to them-"

"_What_?" Leela interrupted, glaring at the Doctor as she processed what she'd just heard. "You _gave him away_? Why would you do that to Romana?"

For a moment, the Doctor could only sit in silence, his mind going over his possible responses- the truth might be the most obvious, but that didn't mean he had to like it-, before he pushed any thought of lying aside; after everything Leela had been through on Gallifrey, she deserved the truth.

"Well," he began, taking a deep breath as he looked at her, "firstly, you'll be pleased to know that what you did saved Gallifrey; the detonation of all those temporal weapons in a TARDIS's state of temporal grace triggered a wave of benevolent temporal energy that caused all biological life in the immediate vicinity to regress backwards a few months, healing your eyes _and _erasing any trace of the Free Time virus from the planet."

"Really?" Leela asked, looking at him slightly uncertainly. "It was... that simple?"

"Well, the conditions aren't exactly easy to duplicate- the odds of the TARDIS detonating at just the right distance from Gallifrey for the resulting temporal waves to have that effect without causing a dangerous level of cellular regression _are _rather slim; you could have easily caused a significant portion of the planet to regress to protoplasm-, but essentially, yep; you single-handedly saved Gallifrey _and _restored your sight in one moment," the Doctor said, smiling at her before the smile faded. "But... well, it didn't last."

"It... it didn't?" Leela asked, looking apprehensively at the Doctor. "What... what happened?"

"Daleks," the Doctor responded, his tone grim as he addressed his old companion (He had already made up his mind not to reveal the full extent of Romana's role in the destruction of Gallifrey; his old companion had done what she could at the last minute, and tarnishing her memory wouldn't accomplish anything). "They attacked Gallifrey, Leela... a single, massive strike, penetrating all our defences and shutting down everything we had available to us in a matter of moments; all the reconstruction Romana had done since the civil war in preparation for this assault was undone before they could even _try _to mount a counter-attack."

"Oh no..." Leela whispered in shock, her eyes wide as she stared at the Doctor.

"I tried everything," the Doctor said, his head bowed slightly as he spoke, unwilling to look in Leela's eyes as he revealed his most private shame. "I did all I could to find another way... I tried everything I could think of... but in the end, there was only one thing left to do."

"You..." Leela whispered, her horrified gaze still fixed on the Doctor.

"I destroyed Kasterborus," the Doctor stated simply as he looked up at her. "All of the energy within the TARDIS was released in one blast; the Dalek fleet, Gallifrey, Kasterborus... all gone in a single moment."

He lowered his head with that statement, tears slightly brimming in his eyes as he stared at the floor, unable to look at his old companion until Leela's hand on his shoulder prompted him to look up at her.

"You killed your own people," Leela said simply.

"I did," the Doctor replied; honesty was what Leela deserved at this time, so honesty was what she would get.

"You had no choice," she continued.

"I _should _have-" the Doctor began.

"You did not," Leela interrupted, her gaze fixed on his as she spoke with that same simple directness that had so defined her attitude in her time with the Doctor. "You are not a killer, Doctor, nor are you a warrior as I am; you are a thinker, a speaker, and a teacher before all else, striving to help your opponents see things your way and cease what they are doing before you must make them stop... and if you took such a terrible action, it would have only been because all other options that you might take were far more terrifying and impossible to accept."

She smiled slightly at the Doctor as he stood before her, reaching out to place a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"I forgive you, Doctor," she said simply.

For a moment, the former warrior of the Sevateem wasn't sure how to respond when the Doctor wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face against her shoulder, silently shaking with barely-audible but nevertheless-significant sobs.

The sound of footsteps nearby prompted Leela to look up, but relaxed when she saw that it was merely the dark-skinned woman in red leather she'd seen earlier; judging by the concern on the woman's face as she looked at the Doctor, Leela guessed that this woman was the Time Lord's latest companion...

Then the warmth and affection in the woman's eyes for the man in her arms struck Leela, and she couldn't stop herself from smiling slightly.

It looked as though the Doctor had found his own true mate at last...

She just hoped that things ended better for the Doctor and this woman than they had ended for she and Andred; after all that the Time Lord who had given her so much had been forced to sacrifice for this universe, losing the woman he loved after so long fleeing love would be a blow she doubted even he could truly recover from...

* * *

AN 3: For those who don't know, Andred was a Chancellory Guard on Gallifrey whom Leela fell in love with after he helped her and the Doctor thwart a Sontaran invasion of Gallifrey in "The Invasion of Time". Their relationship fell apart in the first season of the "Gallifrey" audios when Andred regenerated after a confrontation with an assassin for the Time Lords' Celestial Intervention Agency- attempting to infiltrate the Agency, Andred claimed that he was the Time Lord who'd tried to kill him after disintegrating the other man's body, not considering what his actions would do to Leela until it was too late due to post-regenerative trauma-, Andred later dying during a civil war on Gallifrey before he and Leela could effectively reconcile


	9. Leela's New Life

Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise

Feedback: Feel free

AN: Not really happy about this chapter, but I wanted to wrap this story up and I'm more looking forward to the sequel anyway; now that is where things get _really _interesting...

Old Faces, New Hopes

A few minutes later, Leela sat in the conference room with the Doctor, Martha, and the Torchwood staff, looking at the small group with a slight smile.

"So... you work as 'defenders of Earth', correct?" she asked, the smile on her face an ambiguous one that a part of the Doctor couldn't help but think she must have picked up from his own past self; it somehow managed to avoid being either approving or condescending while simultaneously leaving the person Leela was addressing without any clear idea how she felt about them.

"We do that from time to time, yeah," Owen replied, smiling nonchalantly at Leela before he glanced back over at Tosh with a slightly apprehensive expression.

"That is good," Leela said, nodding at the doctor with an approving expression as she looked over at Jack with a slightly curious smile. "You have travelled with the Doctor?"

"From the Blitz to the year 200 100, with a few interesting stops along the way," Jack replied with a nonchalant grin. "Then... well, I ended up here after a bit of a... complicated... diversion, and I've been working for Torchwood ever since."

"Hold on; _200 100_?" Gwen said, looking between Jack and the Doctor incredulously. "You've gone _that _far...?"

"Oh, that's nothing; I once travelled so far into the future that I reached the point when it was starting to approach the Big Crunch..." the Doctor began, the smile briefly fading from his face as though at some painful memory before he shook it off and turned back to his more recent old companion. "Anyway, you never actually told me; what have you been dealing with here?"

"Oh, just a few little things," Jack said, a nonchalant smile on his face as he spoke. "We've tackled a few bigger problems such as a non-corporeal alien that fed on orgasmic energy, another- slightly more solid- non-corporeal alien that was killing people to maintain its host while it tried to find a way home, a Brudyac warrior that was using humans as hosts to get fuel for its ship, a demon-like monster from the Rift that fed on life, a bunch of alien sleeper agents..."

He shrugged casually. "It's an interesting time, really; a few cases have been more... down to Earth than others- we checked out some odd occurrences with alien tech that turned out to be relatively human in origin, but it's never been anything too major."

"Aliens feeding on _orgasmic energy_?" the Doctor said, looking at Jack with a slightly raised eyebrow. "Why do I get the feeling that might have been drawn here by you, Captain...?"

"Hey, the thing only met me when its host was _unconscious_-" Jack protested with a smile as he looked over at the Time Lord.

"I wish to clarify this," Leela asked, raising her hand as she looked between the Torchwood team. "Captain Harkness is your leader, Miss Sato is your... technical person, Mr Harper treats injuries, Miss Cooper primarily confronts your enemies, and Mr Jones..."

"Essentially, I clean up the paperwork," Ianto said with a shrug.

"And I do a bit more than just point a gun at people-" Gwen began, looking at Leela in an offended manner.

"I did not intend to imply otherwise," Leela said, raising a hand to halt the former policewoman with a reassuring smile. "All I wished to clarify is that you have faced all these dangers- and will doubtless face many more... and you have no one on your team to uniquely act as the warrior for your group?"

"Well, we all do our bit-" Ianto put in.

"And yet, of all of you, only two are actual _fighters_; you others merely... do what you can... when the time comes," Leela stated, indicating Jack and Gwen with brief nods as she turned to the Doctor. "While I understand and appreciate your methods, Doctor, it is clear from their tales that these people face a more difficult task than you; you confront foes in public positions with clearly defined plans, but this group must handle matters in a quieter manner and remain to live their lives in that place afterwards... and they have few people capable of confronting these enemies when the situation becomes physical."

She smiled reassuringly at her old friend. "As... exhilarating... as it would be to return to the TARDIS with you, I feel that I can be more help here, where they need someone who can physically confront their enemies quickly and silently; you cannot deny that I have... experience... in that area."

"Tell me about it; you and those Janus thorns..." the Doctor muttered, a slightly wistful smile mixed with a hint of exasperation as he looked at his old companion, before he nodded in a decisive manner. "You're sure that this is what you want?"

"If Torchwood will permit it, I feel that I can help them," Leela confirmed, glancing over at Jack. "Do you wish me to remain?"

"Hey, a chance to help out someone who actually _lived _on _Gallifrey_?" Jack said, grinning broadly at the Sevateem warrior. "Trust me, after everything I've heard about that place in the legends, if you spent _any _time there, you've probably got some _very _interesting stuff to teach us..."

"Thank you," Leela replied, looking around at the rest of the Torchwood team as they all nodded their assent at her offer, before she turned back to smile slightly at the Doctor. "Besides, I have a feeling that, should I remain with you, as pleasant as it would be to see other worlds again, I would be more of a... 'fifth wheel', I believe the phrase is?"

The Doctor started slightly at that.

"What-?" he began.

"You have been holding Martha Jones's hand for all of this time and rubbing the back of her wrist with your thumb without either of you noticing that you are doing so," Leela said, smiling slightly at her old mentor and travelling companion as he looked down at where he was doing what she'd just described. "I felt that it was a safe guess."

"Uh... right," the Doctor said, looking slightly sheepishly down at his hand before exchanging an embarrassed smile with Martha as they both stood up. "Well... if you're sure...?"

"I am sure," Leela replied, nodding at the Doctor with a brief grin.

"Good," the Doctor said, before he turned to look at Jack. "Oh, and Jack, if you ever do _anything _to hurt her-"

"It'll make what the Master did to me seem like a picnic, right?" Jack replied, a brief twitch in the corner of his mouth the only sign that the comment he'd just made affected him more than he would like to admit it did.

"The Master?" Owen asked.

"Long story," Jack said simply, his tone and stare making it clear that Owen could pursue that line of inquiry at his own peril, before turning to look at Toshiko. "Tosh, if you could just go and help Leela see about setting up an identity for her here...?"

"Of course," Toshiko said, smiling briefly at Jack before she looked over at Torchwood's newest- if still-unofficial- member. "If you'd just come along...?"

"Well," the Doctor said, standing up and looking at the remaining members of the team with a slight smile as he indicated Martha, "as great as it's been meeting you all- and it _has _been great, really; absolutely _fantastic_-, we really have to be going now..."

"Tell me about it; I've still got exams in a couple of months that I need to revise for," Martha said, smiling teasingly at the Doctor. "Plus, of course, you've got your students to think about..."

"Students?" Gwen said, looking at the Doctor in surprise. "You're... teaching?"

"Well, had to do something while I'm hanging around here," the Doctor said, glancing back at Martha with a warm smile as he spoke. "After all, TARDIS travel's all well and good, but you've got to be supportive when your girlfriend's got exams she needs to pass..."

"Oi!" Martha said, turning to poke him in the chest as they walked back to the TARDIS. "Keep up the condescending attitude and you're not getting steak tomorrow!"

"Aw, come on; you really think _that's _going to hold up?" the Doctor countered. "You withhold the steaks and we _both _lose the chance to test out those extra little herbs..."

_Oh dear God_... he reflected with a suddenly dazed revelation (He'd stopped invoking Rassilon ever since that mess with anti-time; nothing ruined your 'vision' of your god more than him trying to turn you into his assassin) as he entered the TARDIS, his mind continuing to automatically chat with Martha even as the current train of thought occupied his mind._ I've gone _domestic...

The one thing he'd vocally stated that he did _not _do in only his previous body (He might have done it when he adopted Miranda in the body before that, but that had been when he didn't even know who he was; it couldn't really count as _him_), and here he was, living with someone in a flat...

The weirdest part of it all was that he didn't actually mind that much.

He still greatly preferred the freedom that came from regular travel in the TARDIS to anything that a single planet could offer him, of course- Earth was fine for visits but the bureaucracy of living there alone would probably drive him to frustration eventually-, but he had to admit, after so long constantly being on the move ever since he got the TARDIS back after his century-long exile in his eighth incarnation (Barring that whole mess with those apes when he first met Sabbath, of course; hitting that dimensional anomaly and waking up in the eighteenth century without the ship, Fitz or Anji had _not _been fun...), he'd almost forgotten how comparatively relaxing it was to have a fixed routine where you could be a _bit _more certain that people wouldn't try to kill you all the time...

He shook that train of thought off instantly; his 'break' on Orbis might have been nice, but he was past _that _particular near-mid-lives crisis, thank you very much.

He might be sticking around to allow Martha to finish her exams, but once that was done...

The Doctor smiled slightly at the thought of what was waiting for them once they were done here.

After that, the universe was _really _going to be the limit...

Right now, though, he was just going to enjoy the domestic experience as it went along; the TARDIS was in good shape, he was dating (_dating_! He still couldn't quite believe it; a few of his past selves still wondered how he'd come to this...) a brilliant young woman, he'd actually made a decent normal- if somewhat dull by his standards- life for himself, _and _he'd just rescued an old friend from almost certain death after being certain that she _was _dead.

_Life is good_...

* * *

AN 2: Next up, the story that I've been wanting to write ever since the new series began; "The Legacy of Gallifrey", featuring some _very _familiar faces...


End file.
